I was just earlier looking @ Amazon, and they had a listing for a Blu-Ray release of Victory at Sea, NBC’s classic documentary on WWII that aired on Sundays in 1952 and '53. I had thought about sometime getting it for my father, and I was reading reviews of it to try to make a good decision, and one thing stood out: this release has on all 26 of its outings a permanent watermark for Periscope Films, the distributor of this release. It changes from a crosshair logo to periscopefilm.com, then back again, back and forth. Most of the negative reviews reflect that, and a few went so far as to say that this release could possibly be a bootleg. Not only that, but each outing has a forced FBI anti-copy warning on it, according to at least one review.
Here’s the product entry and associated reviews from Amazon:
Happily, Victory at Sea is public domain and available on both YouTube and the Internet Archive, always a go-to source for material you think might be public domain or released under a permissive license. It looks like the files up on the Internet Archive, at least, are free of the bug.
And the FBI anti-copying warning is simply fraudulent, by my lights, given that anyone can copy it for any purpose whatsoever. It is, as mentioned above, public domain.
Bootleg or not, there’s no reason to have a watermark (aka bug) in the corner of a purchased product. I have a DVD set of the series and there ain’t no bug there. The quality is fair but I’m not sure the original film series was available on anything but 16 mm. The only change they made was that the opening credits is only at the beginning of the first ep, and the end credits are after the last ep on each disk. The ones in between get clipped to the stentorian announcer saying “And now, <name of episode>.”
You both have some good points there. I looked at the entries for the Blu and DVD releases, and your points are contained within a lot of the reviews. That one about having it available on YouTube: I’ll have to check that out sometime. Oh, and by the way, that part about the titles only being on the top of the first outing: another series has had that done to its releases-- Little House on the Prairie.
I think that they’re the digital age equivalent of lens flare; people have become so indoctrinated to expect crap all over the bottom of the screen while watching TV programming that the distributor of this set thought nothing of doing it.
I have watched very close to zero commercial TV programming for the last 25-30 years, but in the last year or two, mostly because of our kids, we’ve watched a few current programs either in scheduled time or on-demand. The sheer amount of bobbing, weaving, sliding, bouncing shit on the lower third of the screen just boggles me - I don’t really need to be told this is Alphas, or that it’s playing now (like, effing duh), or about six related programs coming up later that evening… are people’s attention spans and interest in the program up on the screen really that shallow?
Word. Lately, I just wait for a series I’m interested in to come out on disc and put it in my Netflix queue. My rationale is that if it wasn’t popular enough to be on DVD it’s probably too crummy to watch anyway.
